Sea Slug Experiment

“The complexity of animals is reminiscent of the Russian nesting doll, matryoshka, from which endlessly smaller dolls emerge. The deeper you enter the microscopic dimension, the more new and astonishing truths are uncovered.”¹

In 2018, a research team led by David Glanzman, professor of integrative biology in the U.S., succeeded in a “memory transfer” experiment. It was conducted by extracting the nucleus from a neuron of a sea slug and transplanting it into another individual. This was not a simple case of cell transplantation. What the experiment demonstrated was that a sea slug, which had displayed a withdrawal reflex in response to artificial electrical stimulation to its tail, could transfer that memory to another sea slug that had never received such stimulation—prompting the same reflexive behavior.
Sea slugs also appeared in the experiments that led Dr. Eric Kandel to win the Nobel Prize in Physiology or Medicine in 2000.

Through reflex studies on sea slugs, Dr. Kandel uncovered how memory is stored in the brain. He understood memory as being stored in thousands of synapses (neuronal junctions). Glanzman’s subsequent experiment, however, raised the possibility that memory may not reside in the synapse, but rather in the neuron’s nucleus. The search for the physical substance of memory—what is referred to as the engram—continues to fuel neurological exploration. This research holds implications not only for treating diseases such as Alzheimer’s, but also for the future possibilities of manipulating, replicating, or transplanting memories into humans.

As memory gradually reveals its mechanisms to us, the 21st century—an era of digital revolution—has been shaped by questions about the boundaries between humans and non-humans. At once in awe of, and anxious about, the expanding domain of artificial intelligence, we have become immersed in post-human narratives. The global crisis brought on by the COVID-19 pandemic further exposed the limits of modern intellect, accelerating discourses of the Anthropocene and apocalyptic worldviews. In these anxious days, marked by a pace that rivals the speed of technological development, we reference the worlds that science fiction once imagined in order to make sense of the present.


 
Impulse from a Future World

In Choyeop Kim’s short story The Library of Lost Memories,² a library preserves human memories. Through a technology known as “mind uploading,” the memories of the deceased are stored and managed in a data archive. In Young-ha Kim’s novel Goodbye, Human,³ the narrator is a humanoid—a robot modeled after a human. His memories and consciousness are transferred from one body to another through digital backups, enabling him to live eternally. His life ends only when he stops the backups and shuts down the power within his aged body.

In both of these fictions, memory is treated like a form of data. It can be stored, copied, hacked, deleted—and even commercialized. In The Library of Lost Memories, the technology is advertised through a touching scene in which a woman reunites with a simulated memory of her deceased husband, marketed as a consumer product. In Goodbye, Human, the humanoid’s brain data is extracted and uploaded to the cloud, while his body is discarded once it loses utility. The novel also imagines a scenario in which memories accumulated in AI become an advanced form of collective intelligence that threatens humanity.

These fictional portrayals of technological forecasting and symptomatology, along with the rising popularity of science fiction in recent years, attest to a growing contemporary impulse to explore parallel realities. The art world of the 2020s shares in this desire—designing virtual spatiotemporal realms, imagining post-human beings, and producing works engaged with future-oriented discourses. Among these emerging tendencies stands Omyo Cho.

Flesh and Memory

To understand the present of Omyo Cho, one must recall her past. For her first solo exhibition, 《The trace of things unmentioned》 in 2018, Cho selected an abandoned inn in the jjokbangchon district of Changsin-dong as the exhibition site. It was a place from which the dynamism of life had long vanished, where even the traces of poverty and despair had evaporated—leaving behind only worn structures and gray concrete walls.

It seems that Cho sought to draw a kind of map there. Returning to Seoul after studying abroad and embarking on her career as a full-time artist, she aimed to chart her own course. But more than a personal trajectory, it was a map that sought to unearth and reconstruct the traces and remnants of time embedded in that site through artistic means.

Through this process of excavation, physical masses scattered across the site were recontextualized as sculptural objects. The abandoned inn—formerly surviving as little more than a skeletal ruin—was reanimated through tactile experiences. One might interpret this process as a form of performative reconstitution. Cho’s sculptures were born from living inside the inn itself—not installed in front of the space as a finished work, but laid down layer by layer on the floor. Like the accumulation of flesh, through kindred materials, through inner force. She did not merely translate a theme into sculptural form but embodied that theme through sculpture itself. The phenomenological concept of “flesh” from Maurice Merleau-Ponty could well apply to her sculptural practice.

Old wallpaper layered on long-vacant walls like dried skin. Omyo Cho described it as resembling tree rings—perhaps seeing it as an engram of the space and a source of artistic inspiration. She pursued the latent history embedded within, tracing it literarily, and composed an omnibus-style fiction moving between fact and fantasy, which she presented alongside the exhibition.⁴ This approach filled the layered spatial dimensions with literary narratives born from the site. In a single empty room, she placed a hermit crab shell and speaker, replaying the sound of waves to create a different resonance.

The artist summoned what the city had erased or neglected—those “things unmentioned”—and gave them phenomenological presence. In the epilogue to her self-published text, Cho wrote, “The shell is what matters. Whether it’s a conch, a hermit crab, or a life, it doesn’t matter. Our lives are consumed like that, without being remembered.”⁵ It may sound cynical, but in truth, she seemed to be filling the void left by capital’s assault on community with flesh and memory. The sculptures and stories that filled the skeletal ruins and empty shells—together with her critique of society—became central to her artistic methodology from then on.

“Hermit crabs are born without shells and change homes 14 times throughout their lives. In this process, they risk their lives fighting to secure a larger shell. [...] At some point, modern people began living like hermit crabs. As they expand their square footage, communication with neighbors diminishes. I wanted to talk about that regrettable absence.”⁶

The Web of Information

Let us now turn to Jumbo Shrimp, presented in 2021. The work drew inspiration from CAPTCHA—the online verification system used to distinguish humans from bots. Cho pointed out how even these distinguishing traces accumulate in the databases of giant tech corporations. She revealed this critique by incising CAPTCHA patterns into clay using traditional sculptural techniques.

As one followed the paradox of digital information etched into fired clay, a separate zone in the exhibition—divided by walls—revealed an image drawn from the artist’s personal memory: a contemporary sculpture shaped like a net made of glass and metal chain. It was the material manifestation of a fragmented memory described in her essay notebook.

On her first trip to a ski resort as a child, there was a single-seater lift. Each time, she was suspended precariously in the air. Though there was a safety net, she felt constant anxiety. Her ski pole would drop. The net seemed to catch it—barely. As if it had sacrificed the pole in her place. Ever since, she would always drop something when riding lifts. Most often, an old stuffed animal. Seeing that fallen object reassured her. The doll’s vacant eyes looked up in resentment. Reassurance was followed by guilt. But the comfort never lasted long. The primal fear never left. That fragile net was always there. The only way to check was to fall oneself. But that never happened. The net set for safety only intensified the fear.⁷

CAPTCHA is a kind of net. A procedure intended to protect access, but one that could be reversed in purpose—a net that inspires dread. Yet it seems unlikely that Cho retrieved the childhood trauma of the net merely to revisit fear. The net becomes a metaphor for memory and forgetting, a filter that delineates the boundary between life and death. But such binaries are never absolute. The net is always perforated. Another keyword for understanding Cho’s work is that very void.

“There are no voids in the world. But the world we build always has voids, no matter how densely constructed. A net may show the framework of the world, but it can never cover the entirety of life.”⁸

Fragments of flesh that never fully formed, memories that remain incomplete—gaps and holes define them. The memories that fall through become loss, become absence. Cho may have seen the drifting remnants of memory floating over nets of illusion. She may have sensed the unreachable limits of those that fell further still. Her works like the performance Floater, The Doubtful Cutting Board (2020), and Broken Reality (2020) foreground these limits. The series that followed, incorporating references to science and the genre of science fiction, can be seen as attempts to imagine what lies beyond such limits—as a means of mending traces left behind by the departed.

“When I reached my thirties, my mother and I entered different worlds. […] From the dimming world of my mother, I could barely salvage memories that had once existed through fragmented time. My mother’s thoughts always had blanks, and her missing memories turned into trivial events.

‘Absence’ is a word used when everyone acknowledges that something is missing. In that sense, absence does not exist, yet it is present. In contrast, a blank is truly a void, something lost. What was an absence in my world was a blank in my mother’s. Before I knew it, the gaps in my mother’s gaze became a critical perspective through which I, too, came to pursue absent phenomena.”⁹


 
Searching for Memories of the Future

In Nudi Hallucination, presented at the 2022 group exhibition 《Data Garden》,¹⁰ Cho unveiled flesh-like sculptures staged against a bio-scientific backdrop. The narrative constructed around them functioned as a device to situate these sculptures within a future tense. The sculptures shed their immediate objecthood and instead operated as symbolic entities that summoned invisible presences, becoming conceptual forms associated with space and time. While Rosalind Krauss expanded the field of sculpture to include architecture and landscape,¹¹ Cho’s sculptures differ in that she adds the axis of time—deploying them within a four-dimensional field.

Unmoving yet perceived as alive, these uncanny sculptures are conceived as alien life forms from a future time. The Nudi Hallucination series is better understood alongside Cho’s self-written sci-fi novella, “Memory Searcher,” which was inspired by Dr. Glanzman’s memory-transfer experiments involving sea slugs. The story is set in a future society where memories are traded, commodified, and assigned monetary value.

“Memory implantation in minors was a rare phenomenon just ten years ago. But at some point, memories became a kind of credential, and it became common for parents from the lowest income brackets to bring their children to the centers. Of course, these parents scrupulously hid the fact that they had memories implanted in their kids, so the trend never went viral. Still, strangely enough, more parents began to visit the centers over time. Perhaps they all reached the same conclusion after struggling with parenting: if you can’t give your child good experiences, you might as well implant good memories.”¹²

In the novella, the storyline of “Whitemeta,” a company that sells memory as currency, was realized through the VR video Barrel Eye. Meanwhile, the Nudi Hallucination sculptures were designed to resemble the inner and outer forms of sea slugs. The mollusks’ soft and flexible flesh was replaced by amorphous curved glass and resin installations spread like jelly across the floor. Surgical chains, stainless steel, and silver elements formed curved tentacle-like appendages. Inside the transparent glass, reminiscent of the slug’s membrane, appeared long neural fibers and branching neural cell bodies. If imitation bears meaning, then perhaps the memory itself is also transplantable. Sculptures that metaphorically embody the flesh of sea slugs—themselves borderline entities—render the materiality of memory visible, expanding the horizon of cognition.

The following year, Cho expanded the Nudi Hallucination series into a new work titled Altered Fluid, imagining a species that emerges and survives in the aftermath of Earth’s destruction. Assuming the existence of post-human life forms, she replaces their flesh and bones with glass and metal materials, presenting them as future biotic sculptures. In environments with differing temperatures, they become semi-fluid, able to move as if their seals have been broken. Considering that Cho has consistently created her sculptures through melting and solidifying glass and metal, this fictional supposition blends seamlessly into her worldview.

The flesh of the future, having replaced protein, is an invented attribute. As if recalling evolutionary history, these creatures resemble but are not identical to prehistoric life forms—they are no longer defined by human knowledge or intelligence. They are birthed with new brains, different genetic codes, and other trajectories of evolution.

Omyo Cho imagines beings that don’t exist in the world, traces of memory that have slipped through the mesh of time. And in this journey—where vanished memories and unarrived futures seem to exchange places—we find ourselves already participating.
 
 

1. Georges Chapouthier, What Is an Animal?, Hwanggeumgaji, 2006, pp. 24–25.
2. Cho-yeop Kim, “The Greenhouse at the End,” in 2nd Korean Science Fiction Award Winners Anthology, Hubble, 2018, pp. 9–60.
3. Young-ha Kim, Goodbye, Human, Bokbok Books, 2022.
4. Omyo Cho, Traces of the Unmentioned, Matter and Immateriality, 2018.
5. Ibid., p. 103.
6. Pogni Kim, “Art Must Engage with Social Issues,” The Hankyoreh, July 2, 2020.
7. Omyo Cho, excerpt from artist note for 《Jumbo Shrimp》, 2021.
8. Ibid.
9. Omyo Cho, artist note, 2021.
10. Exhibition organized as part of 《Artist View of Science 2022: The Artist's Perspective on Science》, co-hosted by the Surim Cultural Foundation and Korea Institute of Science and Technology (KIST).
11. Rosalind Krauss, “Sculpture in the Expanded Field,” October, vol. 8, 1977, pp. 30–44.
12. Omyo Cho, “Memory Searcher,” unpublished manuscript, 2022.

References

• [비평] 다시 만난 세계의 기억
  [Critique] The Memory of a World Revisited